ZEITGEIST [ZEITGEIST] The Continuing Adventures of Korrigan & Co.

SanjMerchant said:

Assuming both Uru and the country of Ber survive the campaign, I totally want to see Uru become the next Extraño.

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I don't think it would be sensible to put Uru in charge of anything. He's not very focused!

RangerWickett said:

El Extraño was based on the idea one of our Admiral o' the High Seas Kickstarter backers, Michael Hart, proposed. He was always fun to write.

I'm curious how players feel about him.

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I think his introduction is a bit dicey. My players are by now so suspicious that they went to town checking up on Joe Hobner, then pretty much ignored all of the warning signs and got themselves poisoned. So they did get to be 'rescued' by the kobolds, but I think that is an unlikely outcome. (Nothing endears an NPC to a group of players more than being given help, or being given stuff.)

What I now realise I should have done is have the players try hunting for Leone on their own for a while, with impossible DCs and a ridiculous amount of ground to cover. So the huge drop in difficulty provided by El Extrano would have had more of an impact. Still, they liked him, as a colourful character; and they were amused by the fare-dodging kobolds on the train.

I enjoyed playing him. But I don't think he shows up again for a while, does he?

He pops up in adventure 10, then (possibly) 13.

Session 14 (137) Part One - Mirsk Station

MIRSK STATION

Korrigan called in Matunaaga and both joined the unit in Trekhom. Korrigan brought with him a royal warrant for the arrest of Leone Quital in the matter of the atrocity in Flint three years earlier.

They boarded the first train to Mirsk, hoping there were no delays due to the early Autumn snow.

Xambria approached Matunaaga while on board the train. “I’d like to train with you, if I may,” she said. “Because you’re the only one I think can keep up with me.” Matunaaga raised an eyebrow while Xambria searched for a better way to put this. But he agreed to help her work on her unarmed combat skills.

They prepared to face Quital, removing all metallic items, weapons and armor. Matunaaga had brought obsidian weapons for Korrigan and Gupta. Uru made a bow and a blowpipe. Xambria planned to exit her clockwork body and support the team in any way she could from spirit form.

Gupta contacted her friend Braids Hashem, a Drakren who had come to study at the Battalion back when she was in training. He did not operate near Mirsk, but she was able to notify him - and through him his superiors – that the RHC would be pursuing the target of an international arrest warrant. Precise details were not shared, in case of espionage, but Braids agreed to warn the authorities in Mirsk as close to the time as possible.

In Mirsk, Leon talked to the station staff to find out what platform the final train would arrive at. He discovered that it would split and the passenger carriages would come in ahead of the private cars. The private cars would wait on a siding for the freight cars to be decoupled, and enter the station separately about ten minutes later, onto the south platform.

While he learned all this, Leon spotted a dwarf in the back station office who appeared to be taking a keen interest in the conversation and who pretended disinterest when spotted. He sent Rahu Ketu to call in Gupta. She popped her head through the back office door and politely erased the dwarf’s memory.

They crossed the tracks to a maintenance/storage area close to the siding where the private carriages would wait. Korrigan persuaded the rail workers they found there that they should take an early rest break. Gupta used a Docker hand signal on a worker who wore a black and white checked scarf, and he encouraged the others to cooperate.

Xambria exited her clockwork form and buried it in the snow some distance away. It was disturbing to see how the face reverted to anonymous blankness.

Matunaaga climbed up on to the roof of the building. Xambria followed him. Matunaaga pointed out that stealthing on rooftops was kind of his thing but Xambria was not to be dissuaded.

They waited.

The train arrived on time. The passenger cars were decoupled and taken into the station first by a second locomotive. The freight cars and private cars were pushed backwards down the siding to meet a third locomotive. As this began to draw the freight cars away, Uru struck:

The plan was that Uru would first establish if Quital was in the private cars, and alert the others if not. If he was, he would attack and the others would in any case be right behind him.

Uru walked through shadow and found himself in an unlit bedroom compartment. He eased open the door to find Quital sipping wine and humming the strains of an opera. He raised his blowpipe and fired. Quital’s magical cloak writhed up around his exposed neck and intercepted the dart.

At once, Quital was out of his seat, searching for his assailant. He gave a cry of recognition when they alighted on Uru, and at once gestured to a gilded cage hanging over his table. Inside the cage was a little songbird that instantly perished in a cloud of feathers as the cage inverted, flew across the room and reverted to form around Uru, squeezing him tightly and pressing sharp gold-tipped barbs into his flesh.

Quital gave a howl of triumph, as he returned the cage to its hook. “Enjoy your bespoke confinement! There you will remain, you creeping jungle savage, until I have dealt with your friends.” He strode to the far door, threw it open, and shouted an alert to his guards.

gideonpepys said:

(Nothing endears an NPC to a group of players more than being given help, or being given stuff.)

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Ain't that the truth. A few players I have now and have gamed with in the past, not all, but an uncomfortably large minority, seem to think that an NPC is worthless unless they do stuff for them or give them lots of good stuff (and I mean good stuff too, not just a couple of potions or a few hundred gp).

mdusty said:

Ain't that the truth. A few players I have now and have gamed with in the past, not all, but an uncomfortably large minority, seem to think that an NPC is worthless unless they do stuff for them or give them lots of good stuff (and I mean good stuff too, not just a couple of potions or a few hundred gp).

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Having said all that, my players are usually quite well behaved and respond to NPCs very much at face value, as part of the story and the colour of the campaign. Especially when it comes to Zeitgeist.

I think I was wrong in my evaluation of El Extrano for that reason: who cares if he isn't a major player - that's one of the major strengths of the series; even the secondary - hell, the tertiary - characters are beautifully delineated and memorable. Even if El Extrano never appeared again, he did his job in the moment and was fun to roleplay.

gideonpepys said:

Having said all that, my players are usually quite well behaved and respond to NPCs very much at face value, as part of the story and the colour of the campaign. Especially when it comes to Zeitgeist.

I think I was wrong in my evaluation of El Extrano for that reason: who cares if he isn't a major player - that's one of the major strengths of the series; even the secondary - hell, the tertiary - characters are beautifully delineated and memorable. Even if El Extrano never appeared again, he did his job in the moment and was fun to roleplay.

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Well, I personally think his best moment is all the preemptive shut-downs of Pemberton in Adventure 10.

Session 14 (138) Part Two - The Steelshaper's Swansong

THE STEELSHAPER’S SWANSONG

Xambria, in spirit form, phases through the door to Quital’s carriage, finds herself in a vestibule, double-checks Quital is present (by peeping through the wall) and then throws open both doors so the others can gain access.

Quital realises there is someone behind him and heads into the guard compartment, closing the door behind him. A warning shout goes out from one private carriage to the other.

Leon, Rumdoom and Gupta jump aboard the train and enter Quital’s well-appointed lounge. They see Uru hanging in a cage, but don’t have time to get him out.

Matunaaga leaps onto the train roof and runs along it to the far end. The door beneath his feet is open and two riflemen step through. They don’t see him, and take up positions on either side of the carriage aiming back down towards the front.

Korrigan strides towards the train, plants his feet firmly and demands that Quital surrender.

Quital flies out, too fast for Matunaaga to intercept. He turns in middair and, finding a target, rips a one-tonne train wheel off a nearby carriage and hurls it at Matunaaga, who has to throw himself off the roof into the snow to avoid being killed. He lands close to a rifleman and takes him out with a kick. Quital tears the door off another car and wields it telekinetically as a shield. “Once again you flail into my path,” he sneers, “only this time there is no one to save you from me!”

Gupta opens the door to the guard compartment. Two guards are aiming at her. She asks one if he has loaded his gun, giving him pause while he double-checks. Leon teleports himself and Rumdoom behind the two riflemen and Rumdoom disposes of them both with a hammer blow each. He then jumps out of the carriage and takes out the last guard for good measure.

Korrigan joins Matunaaga and tells him to get up, just in time: Quital summons a wicked shrapnel vortex, just as Xambria exits the train alongside them. They all leap out of the deadly zone this creates. Quital cries above the sibilant grinding: “I created something that would change the world, but small-minded gremlins like you would of course be afraid. Such a bold creation demonstrates the futility of your existence! People like you are only useful as stepping stones to greatness. ”

Leon teleports onto the roof of the second private car and weaves a fey spell that causes Quital to flee imagined foes, arriving close to Matunaaga, whose attacks fail against Quital’s metal shield. “Ha haaa!” crows Quital. “You fail again. Your only true success has been your failure. You failed to destroy the work of a genius. Now you will die here in the snow, your blood a fitting signature to my greatest work.”

Huge hatches in the roof of the second car open up and a pair of Bleak Golems clamber out. These things reek of witchoil and wield witchoil filled flails like censers. One jumps down into the snow beside the train; the other crashes along the roof towards Leon. Leon downs a potion and becomes insubstantial. It takes a few useless attacks before the golem realises it can’t harm him.

Unhappy with his new position, Quital knocks Matunaaga aside and returns to the air. Matunaaga is badly beaten up by now, but bravely charges the second golem, to stop it from reaching Korrigan and Xambria.

Using the icon of Avilona, Rumdoom takes to the air – a flying, dwarven ball of ice. His hammer blow is ensorcelled by the magic of the tyrant’s teeth and a spirit tyrannosaur rips through Quital’s defences. The master of magnetism cries out in pain and there is a desperate surge in his powers: he levitates whole train cars, throwing them across the battlefield. Gupta is inside one, and holds on for dear life as it crashes to the ground. Another narrowly misses Rumdoom, and passes straight through Leon to hover ominously over Korrigan. Quital’s power surge also hurls a bleak golem straight at Matunaaga whose arm is broken in fending off its immense weight.

“Brutish enforcers of dim-witted superstition!” cries Quital. “I will crush you all!”

Leon speaks a curse and stuns Quital, causing the hovering carriage to crash to the ground. Korrigan neatly side-steps it. “That’s the importance of keeping calm,” he tells his team, before he reaches out and heals Matunaaga (whose arm nonetheless remains useless for now). Then the unit leader shouts an order at Rumdoom who takes another swing at Quital before the power of the icon fails him. This blow fells the steelshaper who falls thirty feet to sprawl in the snow. Suddenly alarmed that he may have scuppered their plans, Rumdoom evokes the power of good endings to stop Quital from dying, then falls from the sky himself to land right next to his victim.

Too late to aid their charge, a squad of eight marksmen spill out of the far carriage. Gupta, who has clambered half out of Quital’s private car, draws a magic scroll from its case, reads the final command word, and sends an enormous fireball through the air towards them. They fall about in shock and disarray, and immediately flee the field when Leon orders them to stand down.

Xambria makes sure Quital was stable, then cuffs him with wooden mage cuffs. With the command word ‘uvavu’ Leon plunges Quital into the absurdist web, while the others dealt with the two relentless bleak golems.

When the fight is over, Xambria clambers back into her clockwork body.

They smooth over the incident with the Drakren authorities, offer to pay reparations for the damages, and retire to a safe house to interrogate their prisoner.

(Eventually someone remembers Uru, and goes back to retrieve him from the wreckage of the train.)

Session 14 (139) Part Three - The Mindmaker's Gambit

THE MINDMAKER’S GAMBIT

In the relative safety of a private hotel room, they removed Quital from the absurdist web, roused him to semi- consciousness, then waited while he lapsed back into slumber. At once he appeared to jerk awake and try to talk. His words were slurred and incomprehensible. Perhaps Rumdoom’s blow had damaged his brain?

But no: this was just Alexander Grappa, attempting to speak for the first time in many years. He clumsily asked them to be patient and stumbled his way through some nursery rhymes and other repetitive speech exercises. Before he did so, he was at pains to warn them that any jolt or sudden noise could wake Quital.

At length he was ready to talk, albeit with a frustrating stammer. “What I am about to suggest may sound odd. But please b-b-bear with me.”

‘Odd’ was an understatement:

Grappa discovered toward the end of his time with his ‘previous employers’ that they were working with a group of frost giants based in the tower city of Knütpara, trapped over a thousand years ago in a massive glacier. He only managed a bit of investigation of his own, but he learned there was an unnamed frost giant lich whose phylactery was lost in that city, and that the last time he was destroyed a few centuries ago, he apparently reformed stuck in the ice.

The lich’s specialty was ripping souls out of people and planting other souls into the shells of their bodies, mostly as a service for allies of the Demonocracy, to let them be immortal, or so that they could infiltrate groups opposed to the demons. It was apparently quite effective, and could even fool magical detection. Grappa theorized that his former employers were trying to free the lich, but before sending his letter to the constables, he performed a divination and learned that the lich is still trapped in the ice. The other frost giants found him, but apparently haven’t dug him out yet.

Grappa risked only two sending rituals while trapped in Quital’s body. The first was to contact Tinker Oddcog (to no avail, Tinker’s reply was incomprehensible and offered no help to his old friend). The second was to ask if the lich would share his knowledge of soul transfer. The lich agreed, on the condition that he free it.

“D-d-d-do not d-d-doubt my intentions,” Grappa said at this point. “We shall definitely destroy him once we get what we want. I’d hate to release some ancient evil being on the world. But the ritual of soul-transfer could be our only hope of gaining access to the convocation. Security is paramount to our mutual enemies. Illusions, even shape-changing will not suffice.”

Gradually, the penny dropped: Not only was Grappa proposing to use the ritual on Quital, he was proposing to use it on them!

Elaboration was required: Once he had occupied Quital’s body, Grappa would contact Quital’s allies, informing them that he had escaped – better yet, defeated – the unit. (If they moved fast enough they might be able to achieve this before the Ob even knew something was amiss.) Then he would continue with Quital’s plan to meet with Ob officers in Mirsk station, and use the lich’s ritual to supplant each one of them.

The biggest drawback of this plan was that their bodies would have to remain behind – with a gentle repose ritual to preserve them – until they returned. Then Leon suggested they use the absurdist web to bring them along, in magical stasis and safe from divinations.

With that failsafe in place, what could possibly go wrong?

They began to plan for their hike north into the Shawl Mountains: an arduous slog through icy peaks; at least three days by Xambria’s reckoning. Matunaaga’s arm would take too long to heal. He would wait for the others in Mirsk.

gideonpepys said:

THE MINDMAKER’S GAMBIT

...

The lich’s specialty was ripping souls out of people and planting other souls into the shells of their bodies...

Gradually, the penny dropped: Not only was Grappa proposing to use the ritual on Quital, he was proposing to use it on them!

...

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I'm curious what both the out-of-character and in-character reactions to the whole "let's take forcible possession of a person's entire being" plan were.

SanjMerchant said:

I'm curious what both the out-of-character and in-character reactions to the whole "let's take forcible possession of a person's entire being" plan were.

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Oddly, the players who were at the table just accepted it as part of the job. There were some raised eyebrows, but the teaser had primed them for how hard it would be to pierce the Ob's security (as I'm sure was the intention).

Uru's player wasn't there (which is how come he ended up sidelined in Quital's bespoke Uru cage). His reaction to the session report was as follows:

If I understand this correctly:

We are going to free an ancient evil from a glacier, get the soul swapping powers (def. EVIL) and body snatch a group of Ob members so we can infiltrate a secret meeting of a group we have been thwarted by at every turn and this has been suggested by one of the key architects of the Borne doomsday mecha. Plus, our actual bodies will be in an interdimensional portal given by the fey and on our person at the time.

Let’s get this done boys.


That's pretty much out of character and in character rolled into one.

I think the strength of this turn of events is that it is so outlandish it simply doesn't bear thinking about.